


follow to the edge

by poalimal



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Age Difference, Alternate Universe, Controlling Relationships, F/M, Fic in the Time of Quarantine, Grief, Implied abuse, Largely Unrecognisable Characters, Misogyny, Other, Racism, Recovery, Stream of Consciousness and Time
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-17
Updated: 2020-07-17
Packaged: 2021-03-05 02:35:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,061
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25306843
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/poalimal/pseuds/poalimal
Summary: 'You are whoever you needed to be.'
Relationships: Reaper | Gabriel Reyes/Soldier: 76 | Jack Morrison
Comments: 6
Kudos: 5





	follow to the edge

i.

She wonders these days... if she is too bitter.

She is 34 now. She has been with him-- she had been with him for a long time. They met when she was 18-turning-19. Running away from home via diploma. She was a poor brown kid, barely bilingual, who thought she was grown. And what a trajectory!, what an escape: dropping out of school and getting married and going back to school; losing her job, losing her hair, losing her mind; reconnecting with her sister, with her family, (with some of her family); moving out, falling out of love, moving back in, divorcing him! finally! divorcing him; moving out, getting a restraining order, becoming a stranger, becoming a villain, a whore, a widow. A stranger, again. 

All along, Jack seemed to hover. 

He was 10-15 years older than her - the range dependent on how honest he felt about being about his legal name - about his first wife - his oldest child. His oldest child, Hannah, who tracked them down in Pilsen during a blizzard; Hannah, who pretended in the peephole to be a new neighbour, and then threw a tray of store-bought cookies in her face when she opened the door. Hannah, who eventually scratched her way into the living room, who fell down on the couch and cried into her father's arms. After that Gabi wasn't allowed to get angry. 

(Well - she wasn't _supposed_ to get angry. She threw the cookies back at them both.)

The girl has something of her father in her forehead; the way she scrunches it up in thought. She is a troubled sleeper, and spends long college weekends in Gabi's guest room. She has decided she likes Gabi now. At least she is lonely enough to tolerate her; to mimic her. Lately she leans into an odd kind of accent whenever they are out and about. She is white. Not white Mexican, like Gabi's cousins - like, Mayflower white. It's very odd. Gabi's not sure how to bring it up just yet. 

(She will eventually bring it up. It will not go well. They will fall out of touch. For many years Hannah will send Christmas cards to the wrong address.)

ii.

There is a body of knowledge about Jack that she has to unlearn. A pattern she falls into unthinkingly. Gutting the fish while the radio played; eating on the same side of a table she watched him build. Trailing behind him when he washed the dishes. The hair on his forearms, gold in the light. Rough drafts read aloud; the moon in their bed. 

His fingers - the way they splayed. 

The way he looked at her, when she still needed him. The way he looked when she no longer did.

She tells her next date she can't cook. Oh, and she has allergies - that's why she doesn't wear perfume.

His favourite scent of hers--

She has the choice to avoid this line of thought. 

She proceeds: 

\--his favourite scent... was a perfume she used when they first met. Sour green apple. 

It is a cloying scent, she thinks when she rediscovers it. When she doubts herself, she does so acutely; and she begins to doubt herself on this. She read once that perfumes are chaotically difficult to reproduce. There are a number of factors: production costs - industry trends - ingredient popularity - things like that. After all, it really has been years. Perhaps it didn't always smell so sickly-sweet? Maybe there was another element that drew her to it.

Maybe there wasn't. Maybe she liked it because she was just a kid who liked sweet things. Maybe he chose her _because_ \--

  
iii.

'You are whoever you needed to be,' her therapist says. 'Now become the person you needed back then.'

iv.

Her sister - who is in law school, and has no sense of irony - asks why she has to make everything so damn complicated these days. She says she is making up for lost time.

v.

She kept her hair short when she was with him. She kept her weight low. She opened the door to strangers. (Hence: cookies to the face.) There were certain topics she avoided - books she didn't read or write - places she never went - opportunities, job offers, friendships she turned down. She took his side, always, even against herself. She was the only one in his corner, she thought. He was not abusive. (She reviews her opinion of this as she gets older.) He was as kind as he could be when he didn't understand her - when he lied to her - when he wouldn't understand all the ways in which he suffocated her. 

He couldn't have hated her. She told herself this over and over until she couldn't anymore: he couldn't have hated her. 

Maybe it doesn't matter if he did.

She loved him. She thinks of him in random moments. At the end of her morning run, jogging alone up the stairs. When she leaves the milk out and it spoils. When she shaves her legs higher than the knee.

She sees how her sister hates him - with such severity. Wouldn't that be something. If she could do that - hate him with such precision. Wouldn't that be something? 

She knows that she is not alone in her mourning. Not technically. She cannot know if she will ever stop mourning him. Perhaps the grief doesn't surround her so much over the years. It takes years to tell her wife about him. It is a thing her throat would rather swallow than open up and explain.

Some things never stop hurting, really. Some things go beyond pain - some things make themselves into you, inside of you. And all you can do is learn how to be more tender with yourself, and the person you have become.

vi.

It is not all bad. 

The morning after Jack's funeral, for example - I don't know how to explain it to you - when she woke in bed - the sun was rising in Compton, and she was all alone, lying beside his empty coat - when she wiped away the crust in her eyes from dried-out tears - when she saw that same old smudge on her bedroom wall that she had made herself when she first moved in - when she sat up and she realised that she would never, ever see Jack again - do you know? 

She finally felt free. 

**Author's Note:**

> [In the deepest ocean, the bottom of the--](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AHeW8McMBS8)


End file.
